Thursday, February 26, 2015

I am very sad to report that John Pinner has passed away. The Python Community has lost a great friend. John received a PSF Community Service Award in 2010 for his many contributions. He was a PSF fellow and an organizer of PyCon UK from 2007 to 2014 and of EuroPython from 2004 to 2011. He was also a frequent speaker at PyCons, and at workshops and users' groups, as well as an enthusiastic and effective advocate of Python and Open Source.

John was an original contributor to Free and Libre Open Source Software UK (FLOSS), which started out as the UK Unix Users Group (UKUUG). After working 21 years as Principal Engineer for The Rover Company Limited, he decided to found his own company, Clockwork Software Systems.

His dedication to and interest in Python are best expressed in his own words:

Thanks to Linux Journal I 'discovered' Python in 2000 and have been using it ever since; together with an occasional regression to C, it covers all my programming needs. I find that it gets in the way least of all the languages I have used, and brings back the joy to programming. I am proud to be an elected member of the Python Software Foundation, and am something of a Python evangelist, through running training courses and promoting such events such as PyCon UK.

I had the great honor and pleasure of meeting and spending time with John at PyCon UK in 2013. He was a delightful host, full of energy, knowledge about the locale (history, good beers and the best pubs, landmarks, neighborhoods, cathedrals), and enthusiastic good will. To give a sense of his warm-hearted and jovial personality to those who didn't know him, his intermediate-level Python tutorial included such topics as WTF is Pythonic and it's not C, C++ or Java, don't try and make it so. Heartfelt condolences to his family and to all whose lives he touched. He will be sorely missed.

Sunday, February 22, 2015

“RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 4th Quarter 2014 Community Service Awards to Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka for their work creating and growing Django Girls, an educational program which has reached more than half a dozen countries, and continues to grow to many more.”

Django Girls was founded by Ola Sitarska and Ola Sendecka as a workshop for about 20 people at EuroPython 2014 in Berlin. According to the Django Girls Website,

"Django Girls is a non-profit organization that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support."

I asked Ola Sitarska for her reaction to receiving the PSF award and she responded:

"Receiving the Community Service Award was a wonderful surprise and amazing honor. I never expected that to happen and I couldn't be more grateful for all the support me and Ola received from the Python community while working on Django Girls."

She also gave me some additional background on their extraordinary growth and future plans.

"So far, we've taught Python and Django to 670 women in places like Germany, Poland, Uganda, Kenya, Ukraine, Taiwan, Australia, United States, and many more. All attendees were complete beginners in the world of technology, but a couple of them are already working as Django Developers, taking an active role in Python and Django communities. This year we hope to grow even more, develop new open source teaching materials and setup a Django Girls non-profit organization based in US. You can help us make it happen by becoming a Django Girls Patron."

The PSF isn't the only organization that has recognized the significant contribution made by Django Girls. Last year they were honored with the Django Software Foundation's "Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize".

I'm also very happy to report that the Django Girls will be bringing their one-day workshop to PyCon 2015 in Montreal on April 9: PyCon Montreal 2015 Django Girls Workshop. In addition, there will be workshops all over the world next year. See Django Girls.org for the full schedule of cities and to find out how to become a Django Girls Patron.

For those unable to attend a workshop, Django Girls also provides a free online tutorial that has been used by more 30,000 people. I, myself, as a novice programmer, have taken it and found it to be extremely understandable, effective, and fun.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Since the new PSF bylaws were adopted in 2013, there have been several new membership categories that allow for voting rights.

Unfortunately it has taken some time for the PSF to devise a form to allow members to report their eligibility for those categories. We apologize, but here it is at last: Voting Membership.

We know that many of you have made valuable contributions to the language and the PSF, so we hope that you will take the next step and claim your right to vote. Please review the membership criteria at Membership Bylaws.

And for those of you who are not yet PSF members, we encourage you to join under the Basic Membership category. All it takes is to sign up here: PSF Membership.

Thanks to Director David Mertz for the creation of the form and to Directors Marc-André Lemburg and Nick Coghlan for their assistance.

Addendum: Just to clarify, if you are already a voting member (e.g., as a PSF Fellow), there is no need to do anything more. This new form is for Basic Members who do not as yet have voting rights but who qualify according to the criteria.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Personal Note: In
2013, I attended my first PyCon in Santa Clara, CA. At the time, I
was a complete novice at programming, but interested both because my
partner had been a Python geek for a long time and because I was
embarking on a new career as a freelance tutor, writer, and educator,
and wanted to learn about the educational potential of the open
source tech movement. At the end of the conference, the announcement
of a surprise gift to be given to each attendee was met with the kind
of enthusiastic, almost frenzied joy I have only seen previously at
rock concerts when an unexpected superstar steps onto the stage to
accompany a lesser known headliner (I would give an example here, but
it would certainly date me).

At the 2013 PyCon, each attendee got a Raspberry Pi—a tiny, adaptable, extremely affordable ($25-$35 USD),
yet very powerful, single-board computer that would prove to be a catalyst for the spread of computer
literacy to young and young-at-heart people worldwide.

Image credit: "Raspberry Pi B+ top" by Lucasbosch - Own work.

Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The Raspberry Pi Foundation created the first marketable device in 2011. Their mission, "to
promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially
at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing”
makes them a natural ally of the PSF. According to PSF Director, Marc-André Lemburg,
“The PSF board thinks it's a great idea to get the PSF and the RPF
working together more closely, since we share similar goals and
there's a large overlap in communities, especially on the education
and young coders side.” Furthermore, Raspberry Pis have been used
to teach coding primarily in Scratch and Python, and they are rapidly
gaining in popularity. Currently, over 4.5 million Raspberry Pis have
been produced and shipped.

One of the most
imaginative and exciting of the RPF's educational programs currently
underway in the UK is a competition that will allow UK primary and
secondary school students a chance to do real scientific research in
space. For the competition, teams of students will devise experiments
and/or create software for Raspberry Pis that will be deployed
aboard the International Space Station by British European Space Agency Astronaut,Tim
Peake. The data collected will be downloaded to the students
conducting the winning experiments.

The RPF's and the
UK's commitment to teaching computing skills is further reflected in
their providing teaching resources to aid students in creating their
contest submissions. These resources will be further linked to current teaching curricula in order to
enhance education in STEM fields. Funding and collaboration are
coming not only from educational institutions like the UK Space Agency, UKspace, ESERO-UK and ESA, but also from UK industry. For more details, see AstroPi.

Stay tuned for a
future post on another education project involving Raspberry Pi:
UNICEF's Learning Initiative, as well as some info on the newly
released, quad-core, Rasberry Pi 2.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

The esteemed, international scientific journal Nature has just published an article that names Python as THE programming language to use for scientists and researchers. The article, written by Jeffrey M. Perkel, Programming: Pick up Python a powerful programming language with huge community support. makes clear that programming skills are necessary tools for all working scientists. And Python is increasingly becoming the language that is considered the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-learn tool available for working with what has become the raw material of today's science—big data.

Perkel's account begins with a case example. Dr. Adina Howe, an Environmental Engineer, realized upon taking a research job that she needed programming skills. Python was the language recommended to her by her boss at her first research lab job. Currently, as a Professor of Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University, she includes programming skills in the curricula for future scientists.

According to Perkel, "Among the host of computer-programming languages that scientists might choose to pick up, Python, first released in 1991 by Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum, is an increasingly popular (and free) recommendation. It combines simple syntax, abundant online resources and a rich ecosystem of scientifically focused toolkits with a heavy emphasis on community."

The Python community is cited as particularly important to Python's growing adoption. Perkel quotes PSF Director Jessica McKellar, who uses the concept of a "virtuous cycle" to help explain Python's rapid growth. According to McKellar "new users extend the language into new areas, which in turn attracts still more users."

Perkel also credits the many Python packages and libraries ("batteries included") that allow the language to be useful for a huge variety of purposes. In fact, as the programming community knows very well, that is the beauty of open source—if a need arises, the community will create a module or library to meet that need. Specific packages mentioned in the article are NumPy (mathematical arrays), SciPy (linear algebra, differential equations, signal processing and more), SymPy (symbolic mathematics), matplotlib (graph plotting) and Pandas (data analysis), and Cython.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

One function the PSF is happy to do is to send a PSF Director to PyCons in various parts of the world to give a talk and to provide information about and encourage membership in the PSF. Last week, PSF Director, David Mertz, attended PyCon Belarus in Minsk where he spoke about a new Python language feature (Python's (future) type annotation system(s)) and met many amazing Python users.

Along with David, the other invited keynote speaker was Austin Bingham, originally from Texas and currently co-owner and founder of Sixty North in Stavanger, Norway. Austin spoke on Python refactoring with Rope and Traad.

According to David Mertz, having a PSF Director attend and participate at these conferences "allows us to support the PSF mission, to make new contacts outside the US, and to promote the new membership model."

The January 31st conference, the first ever held in Belarus, was a one-day affair that took place at EventSpace located in central Minsk. Approximately 150 people attended. There were 14 talks, comprising two tracks; talks were given in either Russian or English. Many speakers and attendees came from Russia and Ukraine, both of which have had active recent PyCons.

In the PyCon tradition, lively lightening talks were a popular feature. Austin's talk about what the hell super() does behind the scenes was particularly memorable (hint: see Michele Simionato's article Python 2.3 Method Resolution Order).

One of the corporate sponsors of PyCon Belarus was the Belorussian software company, Wargaming, developer of the hugely popular online multiplayer game World of Tanks. Wargaming employs around 2000 people in Minsk, including 900 software developers. Wargaming also has offices in several other cities worldwide. About 90% of Wargaming's codebase is in Python. David Mertz visited at their invitation and reprised his conference talk. He also discussed performance concerns and optimization. Specifically, major tools allowing significant speed-ups include PyPy and PyPy-STM, Cython, Numba, as well as plain old Cextension modules. David's video is available on You Tube.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

Earlier this week, I posted about a workshop the PSF sponsored given by Geek Girls Carrots. Since then, I've been in touch with organizer, Zuzanna Podwińska, who provided the following additional information.

Geek Girls Carrots is a community of women who are interested in IT and new technologies. Our goal is to encourage women to take up IT-related careers, and to promote women who already work in the field.

To achieve this, we organize regular meet-ups as well as various coding workshops. At each meet-up, we have a speaker - usually a woman who works with new technologies - and a networking session, which is when members of the community get to know each other and inspire each other. People who come to our meetings are from various walks of life - some of them professionals, some considering changing their career paths, some are just hobbyists. What connects them all is love for new technologies.

Our community was started by Kamila Sidor and Kamila Stępniowska in Warsaw, Poland in 2011 and it has been rapidly growing ever since. At this point, we organize meet-ups in 22 cities all over the world - mostly in Poland, but also in places such as Berlin, London, Seattle, or New York City. The organizing team is now 71 people and growing.

Besides the meet-ups, we organize coding workshops, such as the Django Carrots workshops which you supported. So far in Warsaw we have had five editions of Django Carrots and 212 people - attendees and mentors - have participated since the first edition.

Every week, two coding workshops, Code Carrots Python and Code Carrots JavaScript, take place in Warsaw.There is also a 6-week-long coding workshop in Seattle.

Attendees of our programming workshops are very often people who want to switch career paths to a more technical, IT-oriented one. Although sometimes they are just curious to see what programming is all about. Most of our workshops are for beginners. We meet at offices and co-working spaces made available to us by our partners.

What really keeps us going is the stories of women who started their programming adventure with us and have since become professional developers. My personal favourite is the story of Gosia, who, as a psychology graduate, participated in the 3rd edition of Django Carrots and quickly realized programming is the thing she wants to do. She decided to change her career path completely and today not only is she a professional developer, but she also teaches JavaScript at our weekly Code Carrots course. In fact, the other female Code Carrots JS mentor also started programming with us.

And the really exciting news is that Geek Girls are bringing a Django Carrots workshop to PyCon 2015 in Montreal! If you haven't signed up yet, there's still time: Django Carrots Workshop. Looking forward to meeting Zuzanna and her group in Montreal.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

We are happy to announce that we have successfully distributed the first 5,000 copies of the PSF Python Brochure to Python conferences and user groups around the world.

Even without doing any major announcement of the possibility to order the brochure for conferences and user groups, we easily received enough requests to have the first print run completely distributed in just a few months.

Brochures were sent to PyCon US 2014 in Montreal, EuroPython 2014, PyCons and open source conferences in India, UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium and to many professional users around the world.

Promoting Python to new audiences

The feedback we received was positive all around.

Conference attendees were really happy to be able to easily show and prove how Python changes the world, to make the point that learning and using Python is a good investment.

The brochure helps them in promoting Python in their local and professional communities, especially to the many non-technical people we cannot easily reach with our python.org web site.

We would like to thank all our sponsors and contributors for their hard work to achieve this impressing result.

Please help us kick start the second print run !

In order to continue with the distribution of the remaining 5,000 copies of the Vol. 1 edition, we are now looking for two additional halfpage ad sponsors to help finance the print run and distribution costs.

We have reserved the notes area on the inner back cover page of the brochure for these extra ads.

If you would like to show your support for Python and its community and reach out to thousands of people interested in Python, now is the time to sign up as ad sponsor!

Pre-order the PSF Python Brochure

We provide two options for pre-ordering the brochure from the second print run which will be available early in April 2015:

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

For many people, myself included, it's hard to see the way that my individual dreams and desires may be part of a bigger movement, and may, in fact, contribute to the projects and concerns of a larger community. But if you're part of the Python community, indeed you are part of something big, something special, and something that will support your efforts to use Python, as well as to educate and empower others to learn programming and to join the open source movement.

One example of the way in which the PSF supports its members is in giving grants to fund workshops and events like one held in Warsaw in January. The PSF contributed $1,000 USD to the Geek Girls Carrots Warsaw workshop. Not a huge amount, but enough to make a big impact. According to Zuzanna Podwińska, the organizer of the event,

“With your help, we’ve managed to invite 42 students and 14 mentors, who during 2,5 days wrote on average 286 lines of code each, ate 20 kg of carrots, and drank 85 liters of coffee and tea :) Thanks to your support, we were able to provide them with warm meals and drinks during the two workshop days, and they were able to focus fully on the important part - learning Python programming.”

Zuzanna also sent some pics.

Their commitment to teaching Python extends even further.

“Since we believe that such events are just a good start of one’s programming adventure, we organize weekly free Python programming workshops called Code Carrots, which allow people to practice coding regularly. 50 awesome new attendees came to the last meeting! Watching them make progress is what really keeps us going :)”

If you're looking for inspiration to hold your own workshop or users group, there are plenty of models available and many people in the Python community to help. (See for example http://django.carrots.pl/en/ for teaching materials, and go to python.org to find out about funding.)

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Sometime back in 2011, the PSF realized that Python, although at the time a mature and widely-used language, was still unknown to many decision-makers outside of the tech world. To remedy this obstacle to Python's growth (and grave injustice), the brochure project was born.

For over two years, the brochure team, headed by PSF Director, Marc-Andre Lemburg, sought success stories and sponsors, in order to demonstrate to “CIOs and chief developers, scientists and programmers, university lecturers, teachers and students, customers, clients, managers and employees” that Python could be the programming solution they were looking for. The brochure team also worked hard to ensure there would be no cost to the PSF membership by securing sponsors' ads to fund all printing and distribution.

Making its debut in April at PyCon 2014 in Montreal (issued in two releases of 5,000 copies each, with the first release running out almost immediately), the brochure was titled “python: a programming language changes the world.” The brochure makes clear in 32 pages of vivid detail why Python has become a leading programming language in business and industry, finance, science and research, media, education, the public sector, government, and charity worldwide.

Python's leanness (for example, "a task that requires an average of twenty lines of code in C and seven in Java can often be done with just one line in Python”), agility and flexibility, ease of teaching and learning, capacity for system integration, along with the extremely large number of libraries available, were cited in the brochure over and over again as reasons for its use. According to Chuck Groom – Head of Engineering at the Seattle SurveyMonkey office, “The transition to Python from NET has been a great success. Our Python applications handle heavy traffic without problems. Developers have found it possible to add new features much more quickly than before. New employees get up to speed in a manner of days, and recruiting has become easier.” And other web-service providers featured in the brochure, including Google and You Tube, are just as effusive in their praise.

Examples from science and industry also abound. ArcGIS (geographic information systems), who created the ArcPy module for data analysis conversion and management, identifies an additional benefit in describing the Python community as “an extended workbench of a company's own IT department.” More scientific uses are described in the brochure by OpenQuake, OpenERP, and Intellovations (maker of ForecastWatch).

Making "heavy use of Python," scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) are able to develop software that will, in the future, be put to use on Mars to search for signs of life. And at CERN, physicists, in only 6 months, were able to replace the C++ analysis framework used for choosing experiment parameters with Python. The result, “This new system has been in use for a few years now, and many problems that could not be solved using the previous system are now literally one-liners.”

Today's film industry is also shown to be committed to Python. Companies such as Industial Light and Magic and Side Effects use Python for their animation software and to manage production processes. Accoring to Tommy Burnette, head of Global Pipeline, Lucasfilm,"Python plays a key role in our production pipeline. Without it a project the size of The Avengers would have been very difficult to pull off. From crowd rendering to batch processing to compositing, Python binds all things together." And Blender , “a free open-source 3D content creation suite," uses Python as its primary language.

Not to be overlooked, the financial services industry is also featured as greatly reliant on Python. Examples in the brochure include Swisscom IT Services and Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg. And companies such as eGenix.com, which providesPython-based software to the nation of Ghana for the collection of VAT revenue, point up Python's importance in contributing to developing economies.

The brochure also features several educational uses of Python that serve to empower disadvantaged learners, like One Laptop per Child (OLPC), which has provided laptop computers to over 2.5 million children and teachers in 42 countries, and the PHOENIX project (Physics with Homemade Equipment and Innovative Experiments) started in 2004 by the Inter University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) in India.

The above are just a few of the abundant and impressive stories highlighted in the PSF brochure. Visit the website or download a copy for more info about how Python is indeed "changing the world." And If you or someone you know would benefit from this type of exposure or if you have a success story you'd like to share, please let us know.